The Chicago Board of Education last week unanimously agreed to stop
requiring a controversial reading program that has cost the city
approximately $7.5 million in the last five years.

The program was based on the "mastery learning" concept developed by
the education theorist Benjamin S. Bloom. Chicago was one of the first
districts in the country to endorse the concept enthusiastically, and
the mastery-learning materials developed in Chicago schools have been
adopted by schools nationwide in recent years.

The school board's vote came after a school-district committee
established to review the program reported that it diverted time and
money from better teaching methods.

The Chicago Mastery Learning Reading program (cmlr) had the strong
support of former Superintendent of Schools Ruth B. Love, who left her
job in March after the board refused to renew her contract. The program
has been required in grades K-8 in all Chicago public schools since
1981.

Schools in more than 1,000 other districts throughout the country
now use the program developed by the Chicago school system.

In 1980, the Chicago Board of Education signed a 20-year contract
with a Massachusetts publishing firm giving the company the right to
produce and sell cmlr materials as a commercial product.

The city's shift away from the cmlr program is forcing the board to
consider revising a number of other school policies, including those
for grade promotion. In recent years, promotion has been based
primarily on whether a student accomplishes a certain proportion of the
mastery-learning skills for his or her grade.

An initial proposal to revise the promotion policy met with sharp
criticism at a public hearing last week.

Opponents said the draft policy--which would rely in part on
standardized-test scores--would result in tens of thousands of
elementary-school children repeating a grade and would increase their
chances of dropping out of school.

The proposed policy is being revised and additional public hearings
will take place in the next few weeks.

Mastery learning presumes that all students can learn given the
right amount of time and instruction. It emphasizes students' mastery
of small units of study in sequence and detailed testing on the
material taught.

If a student does not master a given unit, the teacher must present
it once more using a different instructional strategy. The student is
then tested again. The process continues indefinitely until the student
meets a particular objective and can move on.

Mr. Bloom, who is distinguished service professor emeritus at the
University of Chicago School of Education, said last week that he was
not consulted in developing Chicago's program or in reviewing the cmlr
materials.

The Chicago board's vote to discard the cmlr program--as well as a
similar program in mathematics--follows more than six months of
mounting criticism.

In February, a report by Designs for Change, a local
education-research and advocacy organization, said 75 percent of
Chicago's 9th graders were reading below grade level. The report blamed
the school system's over-reliance on the cmlr program as contributing
to the low test scores and recommended that an independent panel be
established to review the program.

Early proponents of the cmlr program had hailed it as a way to
reduce climbing illiteracy rates and as a particularly effective
program for teaching low-income children. But today, opponents claim
that the program dampens children's enthusiasm and ability to read by
presenting reading as a set of fragmented tasks.

"Mastery learning is not merely a series of work skills," said Mr.
Bloom. "It has to involve reading. Unless a kid reads a great deal,
he's not going to learn reading very well, no matter how many separate
skills he has."

Chicago's new superintendent, Manford Byrd Jr., in April created a
reading committee comprising teachers, principals, union and community
representatives, and parents to determine whether the cmlr program
should be eliminated.

The committee's report, presented to the board of education in July,
charged that the program's materials contained grammatical errors,
illogical instructions, reading passages too short for comprehension,
disjointed units that provided little use of the skills learned in
actual reading, and test items that did not reflect what students were
taught.

The committee also found that the program placed an "overwhelming"
record-keeping burden on teachers and principals.

Although the school system's guidelines stated that the program was
not intended to make up ael5lschool's entire reading curriculum, the
committee noted that the sheer amount of time the program required had
compelled many teachers to limit their choice of materials to cmlr.

The primary criticism, according to George Munoz, president of the
Chicago Board of Education, "was that it was too much of a crutch for
the teaching staff to rely on these mechanical teaching techniques.
And, more importantly, administrators put too much emphasis on the
mechanics of reading and not enough on reading itself. The object
became mastering mastery learning and not mastering reading or
math."

The committee recommended that the district use the cmlr program as
a supplement only to more traditional reading programs. It also
advocated revising the program materials and finding a new publisher by
the 1986-87 school year if the district wants to retain an optional
program.

"Ironically, it is the low achievers who have been most
detrimentally affected" by the cmlr program, said Sharon Weitzman, a
member of the review committee and research coordinator for Designs for
Change. "In some classrooms, low achievers are required to spend double
the time on cmlr materials--leaving them virtually no time to engage in
the reading or discussion of stories that experts agree is essential to
the learning process. The result is that low achievers fall even
further behind their average or above-average counterparts."

The decision to drop the cmlr program will end a 20-year contract
between the Chicago school board and the program's publisher, Mastery
Education Corp. of Watertown, Mass.

The contract gave the publishing company exclusive rights to
publish, market, and sell the workbooks and teachers' manuals produced
through Chicago's mastery-learning program and required that the
company pay royalties to the Chicago Board of Education for any
materials sold to other districts.

Early this month, school-board lawyers and the publishing firm said
the contract does not obligate the Chicago school system to buy the
materials or to continue to revise them for a nationwide market. The
board is free, however, to update and print revised editions of the
materials for its own use.

The Chicago public schools have paid some $7.5 million to the
publishing firm since 1980 for use of the materials. The board has
received $439,000 in royalties from sales of the program since 1981,
according to Brent Farmer, president of the publishing firm.

Even before the board vote, Mr. Byrd issued guidelines that
mastery-learning reading would no longer be required, though it can
still be used as a supplement. In a letter dated July 23 to members of
the board's curriculum committee, Mr. Byrd stated that each elementa-ry
school must have a reading program built on basal or traditional
reading materials.

He also issued guidelines that a similar, optional program for
mathematics should be used as a supplement only. Although the
mathematics program was intended to be a comprehensive curriculum, it
is not being used in many schools and has been primarily limited to
grades K-3.

Mr. Munoz acknowledged that this will be a difficult transition year
as Chicago's schools move from mastery learning to other teaching
methods.

The school system had already purchased cmlr materials for this fall
but is trying to use existing resources and available funds to bring
other materials into the classroom. In addition, the system is
increasing the amount of time required in the curriculum for reading
and mathematics instruction and is setting aside a specific block of
time for actual reading, as opposed to skills development.

Most other school districts have used the mastery-learning program
only in selected schools and have continued to devote most of their
time to traditional teaching methods, according to Donald W. Robb, vice
president of the Mastery Education Corp.

He said the program was never intended to be a "total" reading
program. Chicago's problems with it, he argued, stem from poor
implementation.

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